Banquo

                                
John Haines of Banquo scored 68 points on 34 field goals in a 87-8 win over LaFontaine during the1914 season.

Banquo Gym

     Players Pitched In To Help Build Own Gym

     Huntington county may have had the first rural basketball gym in the nation and a picture, uncovered in a Wayne township attice gives some proof.

     Back in 1911, a group of Banquo men, most of them in their early 20s, sawed some lumber had it finished off and built a 60 x 50 fort building.  It housed a 40 x 50 foot playing floor and treated already-hungry Hoosier cage fans to basketball in its infancy for more than eight years.

     The picture uncovered in the atice showed the 12 men, 10 of them players and two managers standing in front of the gym they built.

     Men from the group still remember clearly the early days in the gym when the "Banquo basketball team" traveled around this area of Indiana and played about a 16 game schedule.

     The gym had a sawdust floor, Roger Smelser, Wayne township farmer recalled.  "You dribbled right along on it", he said.

     The building had two dressing rooms, both about 5 feet by 10.  The small oil stoves in each of the dressing rooms furnished the only heat in the building.  It was built on the Ben Stevens farm, now by owned by Ives Hall "a block west of town."  For the use of the land, Mr. Stevens received a season pass to the basketball games.

     Lights in the gym were first oil lamps, but after the first year, the lights were changed to gas lamps. " we could see everything.  We thought we really had something," Mr. Smelser said.

     The team played to packed houses with games coming almost every Friday night during the winter season.  Foes for the the tilts came from LaFontaine, Lincolnville, Lancaster, Huntington, Huntington college, Marion, Matthews, Fairmount, Monument City,and Mt. Etna.

     "People filled the stands, the ends and looked through the windows," Arthur Spaulding, Banquo merchant, and a member of the team said.  "They'd be lined up waiting for the doors to open.  A couple of obys in the neighborhood used to always bring pennies for admission and just give us nine, hurry in and keep the 10th penny for candy."

     The Banquo basketball team reached its peak in the 1914-15 season when it won 15 of 16 games, losing only to Matthews. But, in the same season the Banquo team also beat Matthews one game.